This should reach the really sophisticated idiots out there. The idea, I gather, is to make light of End of Days as a way of making light of actual feelings of doom and futility shared by co-directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and their pallies. Costarring Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny “slovenly Irish animal” McBride and Craig Robinson, blah blah.

The Daily Beast‘s Richard Porton has today posted a fascinating analysis of the disdain that some feminist critics have expressed towards Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color, which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or last Sunday night.

It all boils down to reactions to the film’s notorious ten-minutes-or-longer sex scene — tongues and fingers and “impressive scissoring,” etc. Porton quotes Manohla Dargis‘s view in her 5.23 N.Y. Times piece that this and similar scenes aren’t cool because they’re basically about Kechiche indulging in male-horndog panting. Here are some of the hot-button points that follow:

I dropped by an apartment yesterday to pick up a set of keys and write down a door code and generally prepare for a move-in. The building manager was away so the person in charge was the cleaning person. She is/was more worldly than I in that she speaks French and Spanish but no English at all. I speak cretin-level French and Spanish, so there was no common language ground. It was agony — I was nearly brought to tears. And all I was trying to do was explain to this woman that I would move in next Monday, 6.3, and vacate on Sunday, 6.9. Somehow this attempt at conveyance (how much simpler could a message be?) turned into a 35-minute melodrama of misunderstanding and subtle groaning.

“Male charm is all but absent from the screen because it’s all but absent from our lives,” writes Benjamin Schwartz in a 5.22 Atlantic piece that I missed until now due to Cannes and whatnot. Most men hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can even identify it. (The damn URL embed capability isn’t working so here it is: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/when-men-lost-their-charm/309303/.)

I’m glad I’m not staying too long in Paris (I return on 6.20) as the movie-release situation is only slightly more aligned with U.S. release dates than in 2003, which is when I last stayed here for any length of time. It’s mostly a problem and a pain for anyone looking to keep abreast. Simultaneous day-and-date openings are only a little more common, but the smaller films (Ariel Vroman‘s The Iceman, Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa) seem to open much later here as a rule. Broken City is playing on U.S. flights but opening here on 6.26; ditto Identity Thief

Even a couple of biggies (like Star Trek Into Darkness) are opening well past the U.S. debut date.

M. Night Shyamalan‘s After Earth (which I’ll probably hate) opens in the U.S. on 5.31 but not until 6.4 in Paris. Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring opens only two days later in Paris than it does in the States. The Internship opens in the States on 6.7 but not in Paris until 6.26. White House Down opens the same day (6.28) in the U.S. as it does here. Man of Steel opens on 6.14 in the States; 6.19 in Paris. And so on. There’s just no home-court advantage to living in Paris and trying to keep up…none.

I’m in touch with all the local publicists, of course, and trying to see what I can see but it’s a lot of work and a drag on a certain level. I’ve been writing this and that U.S. publicist to see about them sending me DVD screeners, but I’ll be happy to return (two weeks in Manhattan before flying back to LA on 7.7) in more ways than one.

If anyone has a PDF of Rodham, the 2012 Black List script by South Korean screenwriter Young Il Kim, please send it along. James “beardo” Ponsoldt will direct the film version with either Jessica Chastain, Amanda Seyfried, Reese Witherspoon or Scarlett Johansson playing Hillary Rodham Clinton. Pic will focus on HRC’s days during the early ’70s when she was lawyering on the House Judiciary Committee that was looking into impeaching Richard Nixon.

Chastain would be the wise casting call, I would think. Seyfried looks like Clinton did in the early ’70s, but she doesn’t exude enough of a contentious-attorney snapdragon mentality. But Witherspoon could do this by bringing back Tracy Flick.